Google self-driving car on display – photo by Mac Morrison The powerful 2008 documentary film Zeitgeist 2: Addendum suggests that our monetary system based on fractional reserves is the fundamental root cause of all of our social ills in our present day society. Part III of the film focuses on the use of technology to ...

Photo courtesy of Yoav Lerman on Flickr Statistics coming out of the UK tell a somewhat positive story about bicycling in that country. Things are moving slowly to be sure, but the statistics indicate that the shift is at least in the right direction, as more and more people are realizing the benefits of using ...

Photo of Heather Normandale by Adam Thompson / RateMyVelo.com After revealing that the average American works about 2 hours a day to pay for the cost of automobile ownership earlier this month, I was asked to participate in a radio interview for the Edmonton’s CJSR 88.5FM on Full English Breakfast with Peter Chapman to talk ...

Photo courtesy of Who Killed the Electric Car I spotted this billboard while watching Who Killed the Electric Car the other day. I couldn’t find a better quality photo of it, so I captured a screenshot from the movie. The tongue-in-cheek billboard reads “Making sure nobody walks in L.A.”. Although catchy and probably effective for ...

Photo of a traffic jam by buzrael / Flickr In the Twelve Steps to recovery from alcoholism – first published in 1939 in Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism – the first step is defined as: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our ...

Father/Son/Velorbis by Gerry Gaffney on RateMyVelo.com I didn’t have the luxury of growing up in a bicycle-friendly culture like they have in the Netherlands. I grew up in North America’s car-centric society, and although I used my bicycle as transportation prior to attaining my driver’s permit, I nonetheless grew up loving cars. As a kid, ...

Cars & cycle path in Montreal, Quebec – April 2011 – James Schwartz / The Urban Country Imagine you could work 500 hours less every year. That works out to be an extra 12.5 weeks of vacation. Alternatively, imagine you got paid for an extra 500 hours of work each year, without having to work ...

Montreal bike infrastructure – by James D. Schwartz / The Urban Country A common misconception in North America is that businesses will suffer if we remove on-street surface parking and replace it with widened sidewalks or bicycle infrastructure. Car-addicted societies have a tendency to believe that people in cars spend more money than people who ...